What is with the Consumer Electronics Show and interior styling bucks? Well, we suppose most automotive electronics aren’t best displayed with a body shell around them, but we digress. The latest automaker to roll out a body-less interior is Audi, which joins Kia in the interior styling-buck group this year. But Audi’s headless cabin is special, because it not only reveals what the innards of the 2015 TT sports car will look like, but also packs the brand’s latest MMI infotainment system and a hot new digital gauge cluster. Let’s investigate:

What It Looks Like

The 2015 TT’s interior is no major deviation from previous designs. It is sporty, simple, and attractive, with aluminum and aluminum-look accents punctuating a largely black sea of leather and plastic. The styling buck Audi brought to CES featured—wait for it—contrasting brown seats, and they’re gorgeous. This is all to be expected, however, from the brand that’s established itself at the forefront of automotive cabin design and quality.

One of the neatest touches is the temperature, fan speed, and seat-heater controls embedded in the A/C vents, which also feature little digital readouts to display the particulars. After sitting in the mocked-up interior for a minute or so, the vents weren’t the most intuitive things to use (the trick: their slats are pre-tilted in a fixed direction, but spinning the outer ring allows users to “point” the flow where they want it), but they look amazing. We also dig the driver-oriented dashboard layout, and the (non-functional, at least in this styling buck) six-speed manual transmission, which bodes well for TT-istas worried the car would go full dual-clutch automatic.

Audi Threw Some Ds on that Digital Gauge Cluster

There are digital gauge clusters, like those found in the Jaguar XJ, Range Rover, and even the Dodge Dart, and then there’s the TT’s digital gauge cluster. As you can see, it’s on a whole ‘nother level. Measuring a substantial 12.3 inches across, the TFT screen is massive and massively sharp—all the better because it handles all of the TT’s infotainment functions. (Notice that the central MMI display is absent here—yup, it’s all funneled to the driver.)

The big display offers two modes, Classic and Infotainment. The former places the speedometer and tach in the foreground, leaving a smaller area for audio, navigation, and settings functions. The latter flips that order, shrinking the speedo and tach and enlarging the infotainment function at hand. As shown in the photos, this means the navigation screen is humongous, though when other functions are selected, their visual space is equally big.

New MMI (left) meets old (right).

Move Over MMI, MMI is Here

Following hot on the heels of Mercedes-Benz’s introduction of a clever multi-touch pad in the latest version of its COMAND infotainment system (debuting in the 2015 C-class), comes Audi’s very similar introduction of the same exact thing for the next-gen MMI system. Building on contemporary MMI’s touch pad, which allows for finger-written character inputs to the nav system, the new MMI’s touch pad responds to swipes and smartphone-like pinch/pull gestures for zoom map functionality. Audi also was able to scrap the outgoing MMI’s quartet of auxiliary buttons around the central controller (on which the touch pad lives) in favor of a two-button setup. The whole shebang operates on Audi’s second-generation modular infotainment system (MIB), dubbed MIB II.

We had the opportunity to sample the system both on the 2015 TT interior mockup, as well as on a show stand that featured both a regular gauge-cluster display and a central monitor. Audi tells us that moving forward, its sports cars will get only the digital gauge cluster—no central screen—whereas its sedans and SUVs will use multiple displays. Regardless of the screen count, they all work the same way via the updated MMI controller. The same twist/tilt knob carries over from current MMI practice, but it’s now flanked by a pair of directional buttons; press the left button, and a sub-menu full of info pertinent to the selected menu (navigation/map, telephone, radio, and media) appears. Tap the right button, and more detailed info for the selected menu appears. Before, MMI’s four buttons around the controller correlated to menu items located in each of the central display’s four corners.

Using the Media menu as an example, the left button calls up a list that includes artist, album, genre, and track selections; the right button calls up a nuanced list of options including sound settings, a store-to-favorites function, random playback, and more. Just above the controller knob sits a pair of rocker switches for switching between navigation, telephone, radio, and media menus. On the TT, which only has the gauge-cluster screen, the left/right buttons are duplicated on the steering wheel, though the regular MMI controller can still be found on the console. The touch pad on the controller now enables multi-touch gesture controls, in addition to the finger-written character input capability it already had. Use a single finger on the pad, and it assumes you’re writing; use two, either to swipe or to pinch/pull for zoom functionality in the navigation menu, and MMI responds accordingly.

Overall, the new MMI has greater functionality and is easier to use—but critically, it’s a logical jump forward and should be at least somewhat recognizable to current Audi owners. (It’s based on Audi’s second-generation MIB II. Better still, the search functionality for the nav system now does a better job of guessing your destination inputs after only a handful of characters have been “written” on the touch pad, speeding up the task and helping to keep drivers’ eyes on the road where they belong. While we wouldn’t categorize MMI as being better than, say, the newest version of COMAND coming to the 2015 Mercedes-Benz C-class, it’s intuitive and slick-looking. Speaking of slick-looking, expect to see (all of the) 2015 TT soon—it’s going on sale later this year.